Posts tagged:#Religion

Utopianism has been a part of Western academia since the work of Lyman Tower Sargent in the 1970s. Taking its etymological roots from Thomas More’s Utopia, it is an interdisciplinary subject that explores human hopes and imagination in radical ways. It aims to build a better tomorrow by criticising the past and the present. It has a broad emancipatory potential which draws in a wide range of scholarship. As an avowed utopianist, I am proud to have my work counted in this field. Yet utopianism is often lacking in racial and cultural diversity. This is a major failing in a field that is supposed to be about challenging oppressive norms.

One of the reasons for this is because of the sources in the canon. Although modern works include writers of colour such as Octavia Butler, there is an assumption that classical utopian literature is almost exclusively white and male. Yet this leaves out a diverse range of texts that imagine the scope of human hope in intersectional ways. An author whose work I feel challenges this white Eurocentrism is Rokeya Shakhawat Hossain. Known in Bangladesh as Begum Rokeya, her life is taught extensively in middle school but is surprisingly absent in later education. Having first studied her biography in History when I was in my early teens, I rediscovered her work in the course of researching my thesis.

Second Class Citizen (1976) by Buchi Emechetais set in Lagos, Nigeria during World War II, and is about a woman called Adah and her marriage to Francis. Although life initially seems rosy for Adah, things turn sour when it becomes clear that Francis is physically and emotionally abusive.

When I was in high school I came across this book by chance; it was in a box full of books the teachers said we could take for free. The main reason I picked the book was because I noticed that the writer was Nigerian and of Igbo descent. Later on, I gave a presentation on it because there were no books by a black woman on our English Literature syllabus. After the presentation I asked if the book could be added and although the teacher was encouraging, my classmates were not. I think it was quite different to what they were used to – most of my classmates were white British. I vividly remember an Irish girl shouting from her desk, “I don’t want to learn about Africa.” I was a confrontational child, so I asked, “Why?’’ And she hit me with: “I just don’t.” I remember being so disappointed, and saying, “Well, I don’t want to learn about James I or Shakespeare and the Industrial Revolution, but you don’t hear me complaining.” This was met with silence.

Abubaker Adam Ibrahim’s short story, ‘The Whispering Trees’, follows the spiritual awakening of protagonist Salim, a Nigerian medical student, after being rendered blind from a fatal car accident. Shortlisted for the 2013 Caine Prize for African Writing, this story stood out to me, with its ability to pair emotional familiarity with cultural insight and authenticity, raising personal questions on the compatibility or incompatibility of spirituality and religion. Seldom approached in Theology or Philosophy courses, the defeat of spirituality by religion and the ongoing practices of spirituality within the African community are subjects in need of more academic scrutiny.

Mohsin Hamid has long been a prime example of an author who has managed to flawlessly bridge the ideological disconnect between the so-called ‘East’ and ‘West.’ His latest work, Exit West, could not have been published at a more pertinent time. Global conflict, reactionary nationalism and a growing refugee crisis are central in guiding the text’s narrative. While the novel incorporates aspects of magical realism, through the piercing reality of the novel’s themes, Hamid fashions a dystopian reality that so vastly mirrors our own. The authenticity of Hamid’s work largely arises from the fact that Hamid tends to construct characters that are not constrained by involuntary factors such as gender, religion or nationality. Instead Hamid’s work is scattered with individuals that very much resemble the complex people we encounter in our everyday lives; conservatively dressed liberals, loving women who resist motherhood, high-lying drug addicts, atheists, theists and everything else in between.

Julian of Norwich, an early fifteenth century East Anglian anchoress, and important Christian mystic and theologian, is the first person to draw attention to her own limitations as a woman. She makes it clear that she is unable to serve as a teacher to her reader, ‘For I am a woman, lewed, febille, and freylle’ (ST 7). Julian pens this admission close to the beginning of her writings, in which she wonderfully and wisely documents a divine visionary experience she had whilst deathly ill in 1373 and on which she continued to ruminate over the course of her subsequent life of enclosure in a Norwich anchorhold. In contrast to her contemporary counterparts, Margery Kempe in particular, Julian is often unduly overlooked in every strand of medieval studies despite being uncontestably deserving of canonical status, not least because she is the first woman ever known to write in the English language.